Monday, June 1, 2009

Intro
After six months of work by more than 30 contributors, we have released Banshee 1.5.0 (aka 1.6 beta 1)! We have an astounding 95 people listed in our developer credits now!
As I recently tweeted, we are also lighting up bugzilla. So far in 2009, # bugs: 950 commented on, 501 closed, 428 filed, 171 with new patches attached!
Release Information
This is a beta release, debuting a lot of big underlying changes. It also has tons of fixes, polish, and performance improvements. Some feature highlights:

BPM Support
With Banshee 1.5.0, you can autodetect the BPM of songs in your library, or you can manually set it by tapping the beat. Then, you can sort, search, or make smart playlists based on BPM.

Automatic Scoring
As you play songs in Banshee 1.5.0, it will automatically assign them scores (0 - 100) based on if/when you press skip.

Creative Commons Integration
A new column displays Creative Commons licensing info where applicable (and properly tagged). The license can be edited in the track editor (see below). There is also a new default Last.fm station for songs tagged 'Creative Commons'.

Track editor, showing BPM and License URI

See the 1.5.0 release notes to read about and see screenshots of the dozens of enhancements and fixes!
Get It!
Since this is a beta release, we are not distributing this through the same channels as our stable releases. Visit our download page or talk to your distro to see if they have a beta channel for Banshee.